In the United States, SCO’s Linux/Unix litigation has been stalled out while the company’s bankruptcy trial is being dealt with. In Germany, however, several court cases have found SCO Group GmbH, SCO’s Germany branch, guilty of lying about Linux containing stolen Unix code.

In the first case, reported on by Heise Online, the pro-Linux German companies Tarent GmbH and Univention found that SCO was once more making claims that Linux contained Unix IP (intellectual property). Specifically, SCO GmbH made the familiar claims that "As we have progressed in our discovery related to this action, SCO has found compelling evidence that the Linux operating system contains unauthorized SCO UNIX intellectual property (IP)." This was followed by the usual threat "If a customer refuses to compensate SCO for its UNIX intellectual property found in Linux by purchasing a license, then SCO may consider litigation."

IBM and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took top supercomputer honors. The IBM Blue Gene/L system installed at the DOE research facility, runs at 478.2 teraflops or 478.2 trillion calculations per second, earning it the most powerful system on the Top 500 Super Computer list, which is published twice annually by the University of Mannheim, Germany, the University of Tennessee and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory. It was released at the International Supercomputer Conference’s in Reno, Nev.

Attackers have stolen passwords and accounts from 92 nonprofits by infiltrating systems at Convio, the leading online marketing company for nonprofits. Affected nonprofit organizations include the American Museum of Natural History, Working Assets, CARE and Free Press.

According to a letter sent by Convio to one of the affected organizations, the email addresses and member passwords were downloaded without authorization from 92 GetActive clients between Oct. 23 and Nov. 1. GetActive is an application that Convio acquired with the nonprofit eCRM software company, also named GetActive, in February.

A federal judge ordered the White House to preserve copies of all its emails, a move that Bush administration lawyers had argued strongly against. U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy directed the Executive Office of the President to safeguard the material in response to two lawsuits that seek to determine whether the White House has destroyed emails in violation of federal law.

The White House is seeking dismissal of the lawsuits brought by two private groups–Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government and the National Security Archive. The organizations allege the disappearance of 5 million White House emails. The court order issued by Kennedy, an appointee of President Clinton, is directed at maintaining backup tapes which contain copies of White House emails.

Here’s a heads-up for those of you who subscribe to the ZATZ RSS news feed: ads will be coming shortly. We know some people won’t like ads, but the simple reality is we have to pay the bills and a larger and larger percentage of our readers are getting their news and information from us through our feeds. So there will be ads.

The reason I’m telling you this now is that we’re starting the beta testing of the ad process. So, you may find the feeds to be a little finicky, on and off, for the next few days. Hopefully, things will stabilize by the end of the week (and hopefully the coding will be done by then as well).

As the system works now, an ad will be dropped into the feed every few items. We’re also going to intersperse different kinds of ads: graphics, short text ads, and more full-bodied ads. Every ad we show will be relevant, and probably useful to you. For example, only ads related to Lotus Notes and Domino will show in the DominoPower feed, and only ads related to Outlook, Exchange, and email will show in the OutlookPower feed.

For now, please hold off on telling me if something’s not working right. As we go through the testing process, we’re going to find a few things that need fixing. Once we think we’ve got it deployed properly, I will ask for bug reports.

Oh, and do us a big favor. Please click on these ads and buy stuff from our advertisers. You’ll help support a vibrant aftermarket and help us continue to bring you more and more great resources and information. — David

A hacker has pleaded guilty to infecting hundreds of thousands of computers with malware in order to steal money from Paypal accounts. He could spend 60 years in prison and face a US$1.75 million fine.

John Schiefer, 26, admitted that he and some associates developed malware that allowed them to create botnet armies of as many as 250,000 computers. Schiefer was able to collect information sent from the infected computers, including usernames and passwords for Paypal accounts. He and his associates were then able to make purchases using the Paypal accounts. They also shared the password information with others.

Google faces a federal patent infringement lawsuit by Northeastern University over technology used in its core Web search system, according to legal papers filed last week. The complaint was filed on November 6 in Marshall, in the Eastern District of Texas–the U.S. court with a history of decisions that are highly favorable to plaintiffs in patent cases–but the case only came to light over the weekend.

The plaintiffs are Northeastern University in Boston and Jarg, a start-up founded by a Northeastern University professor that is the exclusive licensee of search technology patented in 1997, a year before Google was incorporated.

IBM has agreed to buy business intelligence software vendor Cognos for around $5 billion in cash. The move follows a period of consolidation in the BI and performance management software market, where Oracle bought Hyperion, while Cartesis and ALG Software were snapped up by Business Objects, which is itself being swallowed by SAP. Cognos also bought the much smaller performance management software vendor Applix earlier this year.

The move will be a blow to IBM rival Hewlett-Packard, which offers a business intelligence and data warehousing platform built using products from Cognos.

IBM, Microsoft and SAP are taking a charge at the business Web 2.0 market, but the big vendors still lag behind smaller rivals who have developed far more innovative technology with quicker release cycles, according to a Forrester analyst.

Rob Koplowitz, an analyst at Forrester who is performing a comprehensive analysis of the market for blog, wiki, and content collaboration tools, issued research last month examining IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and BEA Systems. His next Enterprise 2.0 report will tackle the smaller players such as Socialtext, Jive, Awareness, Six Apart and Near-Time.

Small vendors have established themselves in the blog and wiki market with more robust technology, and can offer simpler, low-cost deployments, often through software-as-a-service, Koplowitz says.

Even comics are getting on the email-free Friday bandwagon, as evidenced by Friday’s "What the Duck."